Resumen de Oppositional Patterns of Categorisation in the Discourse of Tennis Players
The major objective of this chapter is to examine how tennis players build rhetorically oriented categorisations in their interactions with journalists in the professional setting of post-match press conferences. The focal points of the analysis are speakers' explicit and implicit uses of categories linked to the membership categorisation device of 'profession', the category predicates which are attached by speakers to this membership categorisation device and the interactional design and action orientation of turns in which these categorisations appear. The chapter uses two ethnomethodological approaches of membership categorisation analysis (Sacks 1992; Schegloff 2007; Stokoe 2012) and discursive psychology (potter 1996; Edwards and Potter 1992; 2001) in an investigation of how speakers} categorisation as members of a particular professional group, in this case that of sports people, informs their locally situated practical action and practical reasoning in a specific site of interaction with representatives of the journalistic profession. More specifically, the chapter employs an MCA's concept of the membership categorisation device of 'profession' coupled with the notions of categorytied predicates (Hester 2008; Stokoe 2012) and category-bound activities (Sacks 1992) and unpacks distinct patterns of relationships in which speakers' categories are located, i.e., hierarchies, duplicative organisation or standardised relational pairs (Sacks 1992; Stokoe 2012), in the context of the chapter predominantly manifested in the contrastive pairs of 'projessionallnon-pro!essional', 'insider/outsider '. In addition, what is drawn upon is a discursive psychological conceptualisation of discourse as rhetorically oriented (Potter 1996; Edwards and Potter 2005) and a distinction between offensive and defensive patterns of rhetoric (Edwards and Potter 1992). It is postulated that tennis players establish their professional identities through the construction of opposition moves with respect to journalists' propositions. The chapter aims to investigate how categorisation functIons as a building block of tennis players' opposition. Essentially, players ' use of categories sets up contrasts between players and journalists in terms of such category predicates as knowledge, attributes, competences and obligations (Hester 2008, 135). It is posited in this chapter that players' contrastive categorial practices have a range of in/eractional consequences: they contribute to countering critique, provide a warrant or reinforcement for their counterarguments, challenges and disclaimers. In addition they accomplish a topic shift and thus are instrumental in producing nonanswers.
Finally, the chapter seeks 10 demonstrate how players' patterns of categorisation contribute to building a rhetorically useful explanatory style.
